


The Adventure of the Lipstick Lounge

by ladysisyphus



Category: Sherlock - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The score at the table had stood at Watson 3, Holmes 0 for nearly ten minutes, but a few swallows from the other side of the booth and the slam of an empty glass put Sherlock fully four behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Lipstick Lounge

**Author's Note:**

> Well, it made me laugh to write it, and also I was dared.

The score at the table had stood at Watson 3, Holmes 0 for nearly ten minutes, but a few swallows from the other side of the booth and the slam of an empty glass put Sherlock fully four behind.

Sherlock finally pushed his still-full glass of Guinness toward the other side, surrendering the pretense that he was ever going to drink the thing. He'd long ago given up on trying to refuse a drink while sitting at a pub -- he rather suspected at places like these that one could simply make a full glass appear in front of one by staring down an empty patch of bar long enough -- but it didn't mean he ever intended to partake. He preferred manic and euphoric long before lethargic.

Some candy-pop hit babbled its way from out the speakers, and Sherlock deliberately paid it no mind, lest it catch in his brain and live there for the rest of his life; he already had enough of a problem with that, thank you very much. "Suspected lesbians would have better taste in music," he said, mostly to himself, as he poked at the limp chips in the basket between them.

"What's that?"

" _The music_ ," said Sherlock, answering his companion's question at a more sufficient volume. The tune had a beat, but no one was dancing, as they had been some other nights he'd been dragged along to the now-familiar establishment; everyone looked a little tired tonight, though Sherlock supposed that was what one got for coming out on a Tuesday evening. Still, the place was jammed wall-to-wall with working-class British women, some alone, most in pairs or groups. At his first vist, he'd been a bit of an attraction, half a head taller than most of the other patrons and obviously male to boot, but like everything else, his novelty had swiftly faded; by now, few gave him a second glance.

This evening, however, one of the bartenders sidled over to the table -- a stocky, matronly woman by the name of Adelle, whose low-cut shirts revealed both ample breasts and detailed tattoos -- and leaned against the wooden frame that held up the back of Sherlock's seat. "Your friend here tells me you're good at detecting things," she said, every syllable tellng of her impoverished Welsh upbringing.

Sherlock cast a look across the table to the source of Adelle's information, who at present was little more than a mop of sandy hair bent over what had once been Sherlock's drink, then folded his hands in front of him. "I am," he confirmed, choosing to ignore the impulse to nuance her claim to shreds. Living with John had given him good practice at not correcting _everything_ people said.

"Got a spot of trouble tonight," said Adelle, leaning in even closer. "Do you think you could maybe lend us a hand? Maybe keep it a little quiet, you know?"

Tugging at his cuffs, Sherlock cast a glance around the establishment, which looked no more off than it did any other night. "I don't know if--"

"Of _course_ he will!" Harry slammed her hand down on the table and spoke at a volume that was certainly part of the reason John had declined the invitation to come out with them tonight, sticking his nose back into the latest medical journals and feigning a headache. "He's the great Sherlock Holmes! No case too small, right?"

"Of course I will," Sherlock echoed, wondering what the hell he'd joined up for this time.

 

~*~

 

"And you've been here the whole evening?" Sherlock asked, examining the hinges on the door.

Shauna crossed her arms and leaned back against cardboard boxes filled with beer cans. "Out for a smoke around seven," she said. "Weren't gone for more than a minute, though."

She was in her late twenties, had dropped out of engineering school, and lived with parents who still thought her bright green hair and pierced lip were signs of a passing phase. Sherlock ignored his jealousy about her recent cigarette and gave the door a strong shake. It held sturdy for the most part, but rattled where one of the bottom screws had come loose. "Is there a screwdriver around?" he asked, dropping into a quick, low crouch to get a better look at the situation.

Adelle jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the far door marked **EMPLOYEES ONLY**. "There's a tool kit back in the back. You want I should go get it?"

"No." Sherlock held up his hand, stopping himself as much as halting anything else. "Yes. No, don't go get it. Yes, go look at it."

With an efficient nod, Adelle bustled off as only a woman of her general size and stature could manage. Sherlock gave the door frame a quick slam with the heel of his hand, and a long line splintered off from his impact; the wood was old, and the damp had gotten through to it. He bent down and gave the frame a sniff, but couldn't detect anything out of the ordinary; the must made his sinuses twitch, though, and he rubbed the back of his hand beneath his nose. "What's he doing now?" he heard Shauna whisper from above him.

"He's just doing his thing," answered Harry, speaking at a regular volume. That was one of the reasons they got on so well -- Harry didn't adhere to any rubbish ideas about sugar-coating her opinions or making-believe about the obvious. "...Whatever that is. What _are_ you doing, Sherlock?"

"Testing a theory," he answered, poking around the floor with his gloved fingertips. It was remarkably free of grime and dust, considering that it was the floor of a pub, and the phrase 'so clean you could eat off it' didn't often apply to those.

After a moment, Adelle poked her head back in. "...Look at it and then what?"

"See if there's any white paint on the handle!" Sherlock ordered, exasperated by the mediocre quality of assistance he'd been afforded in this situation, and she was off again.

 

~*~

 

When he poked his head out from beneath the table, he became aware that he'd gathered a half-dozen more eyes upon him, most owned by women he'd just displaced from their seats. As long as he was down there, he made a quick scan of their shoes, noting the various sizes and makes before him. None of them were quite right, as it turned out, but information was everything. He followed a par of particularly tall red shoes up stockinged legs to their owner's face, which glared down at him from beneath a bleached bob. "Strangest pest inspector _I've_ ever seen," she said, meeting his gaze head-on. She, too, was a smoker, and though Sherlock tried to concentrate on her other tells, that one persisted as a prominent feature of his analysis.

"Come off it, Bert," said Harry. She pulled up a barstool and took up a perch on it, crossing her short, round legs beneath her and resting her elbows on her knees. "He's doing a favour for 'Delle."

Bert's expression told of her lingering skepticism, but she folded her arms across her chest just beneath her (obviously augmented) breasts and stepped back, allowing Sherlock the room he needed to pull himself to his feet. Sherlock took two half-full pint glasses off the table and thrust them in Harry's general direction. "Hold these, please."

Harry did, and did without even questioning the request; he didn't know if the smugness on her face was because she understood what he was getting at or because she just wanted to look like she did, but either way, he was just glad she was as compliant as her brother could be, when he had a mind to. He took the other two glasses -- both of these containing half-drunk gin and tonics -- and placed them in the hands of Bert's date, a slender woman whose necklace spelled out 'Janey' in little gold blocks. "What's he doing now?" she asked, looking at Harry.

"Perfectly able to hear you all," Sherlock pointed out, picking the little bowl of nuts from off the table and handing it to Bert, who took it from him and ate a few off the top. He gave one last sweep of the napkins off the table's surface, wiping up some of the excess alcohol that had sloshed over the sides in the process, then grabbed the edge of the lightweight table. With perhaps more theatrics than were strictly necessary, he flipped the entire thing upside-down, in the process upending two chairs and knocking a framed, signed picture of Catherine Tate (of all people, he thought, and damn Mrs. Hudson's television habits for having lodged that piece of information in his brain) off a high shelf.

There were two collective gasps from the women around him, the first at the sudden disturbance he'd caused, and the second as they all leaned in to get a closer look at the underside of the table. "Bet you didn't buy it like _that_ ," said a wide-eyed Shauna, and Adelle shook her head slowly.

 

~*~

 

"But you said it's not _your_ colour at all!" Sherlock pointed his long finger just short of up Maggie's nose; to be fair, she was possessed of a rather large one. "Which I think is a frankly incorrect estimation, but you're entitled to your preferences."

Maggie's eyes nearly went crossed behind her tiny, gold-lensed glasses trying to follow the tip of Sherlock's accusatory digit. "So I don't like rum raisin! Is that a crime now?"

"In some circles it might even be considered a sign of taste." Sherlock hopped up and backward until he was seated on the bar, a move that gave him enough altitude to pull down the closest hanging wine glass from the racks; he supposed he should jump down afterward, what with his back parts now resting on a place where people spilt all manner of spirits, but it gave him a good vantage point, and besides, he had the whole crowd watching now. He held out the glass, and thirty middle-aged lesbians (and, Harry was often quick to point out, sojourning bisexuals) leaned forward, squinting in the dim light.

Janey was the first among them to voice a response: "...So Adelle's done a crap job of wiping the glasses again! What's that got to do with anything?"

Sherlock sighed and nearly threw the glass at her out of sheer spite. "Isn't it _obvious_?" He took from the general shaking of heads and confused mutters that it wasn't. "Three people order -- and only three -- order wine on the same night. One of them orders red; the other two select the house white. The glasses get collected, rinsed -- cursorily -- and returned to the rack. But--!" He paused; he loved this part of the telling, when he had them all on the edge of revelation. "The person who drank from _this_ glass was not even wearing lipstick at all! In fact," Sherlock twisted the glass in his fingers so they could see the way the light shone through the smudge, "she was wearing lip _gloss_."

A perplexed silence fell over his audience. Finally, Shauna raised a hand, schoolgirl-like, and Sherlock nodded to her. "Mightn't she've been wearing lipstick _and_ lip gloss?"

Sherlock opened his mouth to speak, but to his surprise, Harry spoke up first. "Don't be daft," she said, nudging Shauna with her hand that _wasn't_ still holding one of the pint glasses from earlier. "Then we would've found _two_ tubes in the bin instead of just one."

A look of genuine admiration fell across Sherlock's features. "Well _done_ , Harry," he said, blinking a little, and she lifted her glass back to him in a half-toast of acknowledgement.

 

~*~

 

A celebratory anthem (something early Rolling Stones, Sherlock thought, though he couldn't make specifics out over the general hubbub) filled the pub, and _now_ people were dancing -- not Sherlock, of course, but several women around him, including Harry, who had snaked her arm around Shauna's waist in a quite suggestive manner. Shauna looked precisely the type of girl John would have tried to chat up, so Sherlock supposed he was hardly surprised by this development.

Just beyond the edge of the crowd, two black-hatted officers led Maggie out in cuffs as she jerked and struggled; they, however, were a pair of men whose total weight put them around thirty stone, and Maggie was barely the mass of a pebble. She could snarl and shout with the best of them, though, and as they shuffled her out the door, she screamed, loud enough to be heard over the music, " _It was all for you, Janey! I did it all for you!_ "

" _Piss off_!" Janey shouted back, showing Maggie the backside of her two upraised fingers. She may not have been the brightest girl in the building, Sherlock thought, but at least she had the good sense not to be impressed by criminal declarations of affection. The room had a good laugh at that, and Maggie got off one last pathetic wail before she was borne out into the night.

"On the house!" Adelle cried, and she plunked a glass of lager down on the bar by Sherlock. "Anything you want, anything at _all_ , it's yours! You've saved us me and my bar from ruin, Mr. Sherlock! Anything at all!"

A rousing cheer went up from the group of women that had congregated around him, and Sherlock eyed the glass suspiciously. "Don't suppose asking for a glass of _water_ would--"

"Water's foul 'round here!" Bert hollered at him, and the room shared another roar of amusement. "Bottoms up!" She lifed her glass into the air in an impromptu toast, and everyone around her did the same, to loud accolade.

Well, John _had_ just the other day been lecturing him on how important the sharing of customs was for social interaction, which had somehow tangented into how Mrs. Watson had always made her children take three bites of something before they were allowed to say they didn't like it, though he confessed he hadn't been giving his full attention at that point. Thus, in the interest of the proper acknowledgment of the gratitude of others, Sherlock raised the glass to his mouth and took an exploratory sip.

 

~*~

 

The first time he tried to hang up his coat didn't work; it fell just shy of the hook, tumbling to the floor. The front door had been similarly uncooperative, taking a good half-dozen tries before it had accepted his key, and he resolved to go back out in the daylight to see if some hooligans had jammed something in the lock. "How was your night out?" called John from just behind the doorway.

"Productive," answered Sherlock, figuring it was an honest estimation. He took another run at geting his coat onto the rack, and was this time successful, though it hung at an odd angle. He stepped into the room where John was still seated on the couch, and clipped the edge of his shoulder against the door frame. Perhaps the entire house had shifted during his absence, though he figured John would have noticed and comented upon such a thing.

In the middle of typing a blog post, John didn't even look up, much less mention a seismic event. "Met Harry's new girlfriend, then?" he asked, not even bothering to feign enthusiasm now that his sister wasn't around.

"She didn't--" Sherlock started, and he kicked over a pile of books he was fairly sure he hadn't even been _near_. "Wasn't able to make it."

John finally put down his laptop and squinted at Sherlock; he paused and took a sniff of the air, frowning. "...Are you _drunk_?"

" _No_ ," said Sherlock, who wasn't. Drunk had to be a _lot_ more drunk than this. "I'm going ... to bed."

"Drink some water first," John called after him, which would have been perfectly sound advice, Sherlock knew, had he indeed been drunk -- but he wasn't, obviously, so he didn't bother. He kicked off his shoes by the door, dropped his phone beneath a pile of laundry so any further gloating texts from Harry wouldn't disturb him, and was asleep nearly before he landed face-first atop the sheets.


End file.
